Tiny Gardens Everywhere : A History of Urban Resilience

A big history of little spaces, of nature in urban life, and of gardeners and their gardens through time‘Splendid’ Mail on Sunday'Galvanising and hugely readable' Financial Times‘A wonder! Absolutely riveting and beautifully written’ Isabella Tree‘A fascinating, globe-spanning history’ BBC Gardeners' WorldIn the heart of our bustling cities lie overlooked yet vibrant corners of resilience, ingenuity and magic: our gardens. Acclaimed historian Kate Brown takes us from pre-industrial England to modern-day Ohio, via the Paris Commune, Barackia in pre-war Berlin, Soviet allotments in Estonia, the orchards tended by Black migrants in Washington and food forests in contemporary Amsterdam, to encounter ordinary people, working with each other and with nature, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Over the past three hundred years, these tiny gardens, often born from necessity and shaped by precarity, immigration and environmental crisis, have thrived by recycling nutrients, remedying contaminated soil and transforming how we think about our relationship to the earth. Tiny Gardens Everywhere is a hymn to community, repair and the quiet revolutions that begin when someone plants a seed in unloved ground. ‘Engaging and inspiring. A fascinating history into the quietly radical role of allotments … Superb’ Chris Fitch‘A kind of updated urban Berry’ Los Angeles Review of Books‘She deftly combines ... pressing ecological concerns with an absorbing narrative history’ Country Life